When supply chain management senior Zaina Asad reported a sexual assault to UTD’s Title IX office in her freshman year, she said she was met with reassuring words: “We believe you. We support you. We are here to get you justice.”
But over the next eight months, Asad said she encountered a very different reality: a lack of clarity, lengthy delays and a seven-hour formal hearing where she felt the Title IX administrators just wanted to brush her under the rug instead of helping her. When the final determination was made, Asad said she was asked to sign a document to prevent her from publicly discussing the details of her case. What started out as a journey to find justice ended with what Asad said was the complete “loss of [her] story.”
Asad’s story is emblematic of a broader, data-driven anomaly at UTD: a dramatically low rate of reported sexual misconduct and an even lower rate of investigations and sanctions when compared to peer institutions, suggesting a system that survivors may be avoiding or one that fails to act in the first place.
Sexual violence is not unique to UTD. The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network has reported that college campuses present unique dynamics that can increase the risk of sexual violence — as of 2025, 13% of all students experience rape or sexual assault on campus, with an increased rate of 26.4% for female undergraduate students specifically. One in four female undergraduates will experience sexual assault while in college.
“It’s very important to call out all the faults,” Asad said. “But alongside those, I think we need to start getting more attention to what we can do to support those who are going through this. If that is not through Title IX, what can the campus do?”
Asad said she co-founded Crissa’s Community Outreach in August 2023 to advocate for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault and to provide crucial information and support to vulnerable students. Asad said CCO seeks to support students through what can be a highly technical, vulnerable and confusing experience. After it was founded, CCO conducted an anonymous survey of UTD students who had survived sexual assault and used those experiences to create the 20-page “What I Wish I Knew About Title IX” guide, which explains the Title IX process at UTD from the perspective of a survivor.
What is Title IX?
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination based on sex in education programs and activities that receive any federal funding. Institutions covered by the law, including state universities and public schools, are required to enforce Title IX’s non-discrimination mandate.
The types of discrimination covered under Title IX, according to the U.S. Department of Education, include: sex-based harassment, sexual violence, pregnancy discrimination, failure to provide equal athletic opportunity, sex-based discrimination in a school’s STEM courses and programs, discriminatory application of dress code policies and/or enforcement and retaliation.
Alongside Title IX’s nondiscrimination mandate, UTD’s sexual misconduct policy, UTDBP3102, prohibits sexual assault, sexual exploitation, sexual intimidation, sex-based harassment, sexual harassment, domestic violence, dating violence, stalking and “other inappropriate sexual conduct.”
The Office of Institutional Compliance is responsible for responding to and investigating allegations of sexual misconduct under UTDBP3102. The Retrograde reached out to UTD’s Title IX office to gather insight on the process behind filing a complaint and the steps that come after. As of publication, UTD did not respond for comment.
According to the OIC website’s information on how to file a complaint, the process begins with filing an incident report with OIC after experiencing conduct prohibited under UTD’s Sexual Misconduct Policy, which begins the formal grievance process. Filling out and submitting a report form, however, does not constitute a formal complaint and will not immediately start the investigation process. Submitting an incident report is the starting point for the formal complaint process. Reporting means alerting the institution of an incident that needs to be addressed, whereas filing a complaint is a specific account of prohibited conduct that will initiate the applicable grievance process. After submitting an incident report, OIC will reach out to the complainant and set up a meeting to gather additional information along with explaining resolution procedures. It’s during this meeting that the complainant will decide if they’d like to pursue a formal complaint or not.
As part of UTD’s student code of conduct, UTDPP5003, faculty, staff and students selected from the school’s discipline committee serve on hearing panels which, alongside a hearing officer, can listen to complaints and make final determinations on an incident. These incidents can range from academic dishonesty cases to Title IX complaints. Asad said that in her hearing, an off-campus lawyer from the firm Thompson and Horton was hired to evaluate the case instead of the UTD-based panel the policy provides, and that this kind of outsourced hearing officer process was not unusual in the replies CCO received to their survey.
The specific hearing details and reports from cases of sexual violence on campus are not public information. The Retrograde spoke to a former member of the discipline committee who served on various hearing panels during their multi-year tenure, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.
The former committee member, who heard roughly four Title IX cases over the span of a decade, said the majority of their work on the committee involved academic dishonesty and similar scholastic matters. They noted that only a small, static group of the broader committee received the in-depth and specialized training required to handle sensitive cases like sexual assaults, and that after the initial session, no further training was provided. The former member said they always felt strange about how low the standards were in the panel hearings when compared to legal processes.
“It was always weird how we could find someone guilty under Title IX while the courts determined they were innocent,” the former member said. “That is made even more interesting when we didn’t issue sanctions to someone the courts found guilty.”
The former member said the disconnect between the university, legal standards of evidence and the students involved led to an awkward and messy system where faculty, staff and students were asked to make rulings on highly sensitive cases that could have lasting academic and emotional impacts on those involved.
“Victims don’t feel like they’re being heard or taken seriously, the accused feel like they’re being railroaded through a pseudo legal system,” the former member said. “Both claimants and respondents feel like the system is not responding to them because it isn’t structurally designed to.”
Jonathan Gaston-Falk, an education law attorney at the Student Press Law Center, said that so long as universities meet some core requirements, which include but are not limited to notification, complaint and hearing protocols, they have a lot of agency in how Title IX functions on their campus.
“It falls on each institution to articulate how their Title IX due process will function, so a student at MIT may have a completely different experience to someone at UT Austin who will differ from people at Rice or UTD,” Gaston-Falk said.
Gaston-Falk said that the primary way the federal government incentivizes enforcement of Title IX across the country is by withholding federal funding from institutions that fail to adequately implement the law.
“It is a very jaded but helpful view, I think, to look at Title IX as really not meant to protect the victim, but to instead to protect the educational institution,” Gaston-Falk said. “You could see all of these rules as insulation to protect the educational institution from the jeopardy of being denied that federal funding — that’s the carrot for an educational institution.”
Gaston-Falk said survivors of sexual violence or harassment could pursue academic sanctions through Title IX or a criminal filing with the police. Sanctions under UTDBP3102 include but are not limited to disciplinary probation, expulsion, denial of degree and suspension. Gaston-Falk said universities are legally required to respond and treat complaints with care, but that this isn’t always the case. He said that the SPLC had received various reports to its legal hotlines about students concerned that their administrators were trying to dissuade some survivors from approaching the police.
“When administrators emphasize the idea of trust in the campus system and keeping things within only the community, they create a huge problem,” Gaston-Falk said. “This kind of administrative action only serves to confuse students who are in many cases disoriented by the experience and the process, which can lead to the survivor not feeling that their experience is serious enough or worthy of a police investigation. If as a survivor, you think there should be criminal ramifications for your experience, then the internal Title IX structure will not be able to provide you the full spectrum of relief.”
How does UTD compare?
To understand UTD’s unique reporting figures, it’s best to compare its data to other colleges. In terms of population, The Retrograde chose institutions of various sizes: UTD has a student body of approximately 30,000; UT Austin enrolls about 55,000 students; MIT has a student body of approximately 12,000; and UCLA enrolls about 48,000 students.
Despite the varying populations, each school retains a similar ratio of Title IX reports to campus enrollment. The most recent public information, which covers the 2023-2024 school year, shows that about 2.7% of students enrolled at UT reported prohibited conduct; 2.9% of students at UCLA made reports; and 3.5% of students at MIT made reports. UTD logged a sixth of these rates with 0.4% of students reporting prohibited conduct.
Senate Bill 212 is a state law which requires public universities to create summary documents of the Title IX reports they receive each fiscal year. Unlike UT, which hosts all of its documents on its Title IX website, UTD’s Title IX office only hosts the most recent document. UT Rio Grande Valley, UT San Antonio and UT Arlington all, like UT, make their prior documents available online. The Retrograde filed a public records request to obtain all the documents since SB 212 went into effect in 2020; these documents are available at the bottom of the article. Data for the most recent 2024-2025 academic year is not yet available — The Retrograde will provide updates as new documents are published and additional public records arrive.
In addition to the lack of prior documents on its website, UTD’s Title IX Office is also an anomaly in terms of the investigations it conducted. UT initiated a formal investigation in response to about 5.1% of the Title IX reports it received; 3.0% of reports were investigated at UCLA; and 4.3% were investigated at MIT. In the same period, UTD initiated an investigation on just three cases, equivalent to 2.2% of its reports.
In its most recent document, only one of UTD’s three investigations resulted in a sanction. Out of over 30,000 people, one disciplinary sanction was issued against an employee. At the same time, UT issued 31 sanctions. As of publication, data from UCLA and MIT is not yet available regarding the number of sanctions issued during this time period.
Unlike its fellow Texas school, UT, UTD’s public documents have a disclaimer stating the documents exclude complaints and reports made by students and other non-employees. This disclaimer means that UTD’s publicly reported numbers may not include all, if any, student complaints, potentially further obscuring the full scope of reports made to the university. Asad said that from CCO’s survey data, UTD’s complete Title IX figures couldn’t be so low.
“I am not surprised to see the same leniency I felt in my hearing in the reported figures,” Asad said. “It’s pretty normalized on our campus. Our peers have told us about the times they have been groped, harassed, assaulted, preyed on and expected to just continue as if nothing happened.”
Asad said CCO will continue providing resources and education to students, but that students will continue to be victimized by the Title IX process and the culture of silence surrounding it until UTD makes a concerted effort to revamp the entire process.
“It is not just up to survivors to break the silence,” Asad said. “We as a community need to first create a space where they feel safe to do so. We must hold ourselves and our peers accountable so that when survivors share their stories, they feel heard. My story was stolen from me and buried. Don’t let it happen to someone else. Speak up before it’s too late.”
One Comment
“a dramatically low rate of reported sexual misconduct and an even lower rate of investigations and sanctions when compared to peer institutions, suggesting a system that survivors may be avoiding or one that fails to act in the first place.”
Or it could mean that a large percentage of accusations are not a fit for the Title IX process, baseless, or false. I mean just look at the pie charts that show 95% of “reports” are dismissed.